


A Day to Remember

by AmnesiaticRoses



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 12:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9727463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmnesiaticRoses/pseuds/AmnesiaticRoses
Summary: George  decides to work on a new product.(This is very old. Like... 10 years old. My apologies.)





	

It was amazing, the ideas one could get just from visiting somewhere new. 

For George, it was the muggle section of London. People in ridiculous clothing and wild hairdos streamed by, no two alike. Cars – vehicles he had a love-hate relationship with thanks to his father – alternately whizzed and crawled by, their drivers voicing complaints through exasperated blows of the horn. But as entertaining as it was, the best part was the shops. 

Muggles, lacking magic to do things for them, had come up with endlessly inventive ways of getting around their limitations. When he was younger and his father tried to impress this upon him, he’d been irritated, but some part of those lectures had stuck with him. It had become rare, in the years after the war ended, for George to go more than a few months without a fact-finding mission to a muggle shopping district. 

And what items he found! For instance, they seemed to have an endless taste for music, and pressed it onto all kinds of surfaces, from large, black disks the like of which he’d seen some teachers use at Hogwarts to little chips the size of his thumbnail that plugged into many-buttoned squares of metal. And once you had your music-listening media and device, you could listen to it alone with tiny speakers set directly against your ears, or share it through a variety of larger speakers. Lacking electricity in his flat, he didn’t bother with purchasing any, but the idea… the idea captivated him. 

But today’s foray had nothing to do with music. Today, he was after something a little more familiar to his wizarding roots. And he found it toward the center of a small electronics store, item upon item on a small tiered display. 

George picked up one of the small, silver-shelled devices and peered through the viewfinder. Some trick of the glass compressed the wide area of the store into that small, rectangular space. Turning with the camera pressed to his face, he framed different parts of the store and toyed with the zoom until finally he came to a stop on a very-up-close view of a dour-faced man in a store vest. 

“Can I help you?” he asked crisply as George zoomed in on his nose. 

“What can you tell me about your cameras?” George asked, tilting his head until the viewfinder was centered around the salesman’s eye. “Do they all just take still pictures, or do some of them take moving pictures?” 

The salesman raised one eyebrow in undisguised irritation. “Moving pictures. You mean video?” 

“Is video pictures that move?” 

“I suppose so.” 

“Then yes. That. Do any of your cameras do that?” 

George’s view was suddenly cut off as the salesman grabbed the camera very deliberately and pulled it away from him. “Our store looks poorly on people who paw the merchandise without intent to buy,” he said. “Now, if you’re serious about wanting information on these items, I can help you, but otherwise, I’d appreciate you not wasting my time.“ 

For half a heartbeat, George expected to hear a quick quip in a so-like-his-own voice, but none came. None had for more than six years. Smile fading, he said, “’msorry. Please…” he gestured to the display, indicating that the man ought to continue. 

Mollified for the moment, the man put the camera George had been playing with back on its stand and picked up another, slightly more compact. “This is a popular item for beginning photographers. File sizes… er, that’s how much space in a computer the pictures take up. That’s large enough for clear pictures but not so big that you’ll have trouble opening the pictures. Limited zoom, and some compensation for lighting and shaky hands is built in. Here.” He handed the camera over and George looked dutifully at it, though he had no idea how to tell from the outside what was different between it and the previous one. 

“Now if you’re using it for… what ARE you planning to use it for?” the man asked. Now that he felt he had George’s attention, he was a little friendlier. 

George handed the camera back. “Family events,” he said. “Times I want to remember. That sort of thing.” 

“Ahh. Yes, for that sort of use, any of these would be sufficient.” He indicated the entire first row. “When you get into the higher-range cameras, you’d probably simply be adding features you wouldn’t use anyway. And you can always upgrade later if you want. Now, my niece, she just bought this one to take pictures of her new baby, and she loves it. You’ll see the…” 

He let the man drone on, only half listening. He missed the days when inspiration for new items could come from simple banter and brainstorming, but he had to admit that some of the ideas he could get from Muggles weren’t half bad. This idea, he wasn’t sure if he could get to work. But muggle cameras were cheaper than magical ones, and the concept seemed to be the same, and this one could actually do something the magical ones couldn’t. It captured motion, instead of capturing a still image and then imbuing it magically with motion.

He ended up purchasing the first one the salesman had shown him, and headed home with his prize. Time for some research

*****************************************

Usually when Hermione stopped by George and Angelina’s home, it was in the company of Ron, or Harry or Ginny. But today, when she knocked on the door, she was all alone.

Angelina greeted her at the door and ushered her inside. “Hermione, welcome! How was the trip?”

“I don’t know that I’ll EVER get used to Apparating,” Hermione said. “But good, and it’s good to see you.”

“Good to see you as well. I hope you’ll have time to visit for a while once you and that lump in the other room finish whatever you’re working on,” Angelina replied genially. “He’s in the dining room, and there’s tea. He made it, so drink with caution.”

Both women laughed as Hermione made her way to the dining room, where George sat at the table tinkering with something. As she entered, he got up and gave her a bearhug that lifted her off the ground.

“Hermione! Just the lady I needed to save my bacon,” he said.

She laughed and said, “It was more difficult than I thought, you know. It’s not something they just leave lying around. I had to really work up to getting permission to even see it, much less use it.”

“I’ll be paying you back for this for a long time, won’t I?” he asked with mock-moroseness as the two of them sat across from one another at the table. She just grinned in answer.

“So anyhow, I got this book on how they work. But it didn’t really click until I got to try one. The experience is unnerving, really. It’s like you get sucked into the past. Er… you’re aware what you’re making won’t be quite like that, right? Actually allowing people to experience memories would require a whole other set of spell, and frankly I don’t know if-“

“No worries, as long as it can be seen, it’s fine,” George said, holding out his hands. 

This settled her for the moment. “Okay. And what are we actually enchanting?”

“This,” he said, pulling something from the chair next to him and setting it between them on the table.

She looked at it skeptically. “So the space on the back… that would be the reservoir? It’s not that large, but seems a little obvious.”

“It won’t need to hold too much, and as for the way it looks-“ George smiled fondly at it. “-gotta show where it keeps its brain.”

Hermione nodded, as though this were acceptable if not entirely satisfactory as an answer. “All right then. I hope you have backups. This is a complex set of enchantments. Is there a more protected place to work?”

“The workshop’s upstairs,” George said, scooping up the frame and leading the way. “And I’ve made more than a dozen. “Can’t hurt to be prepared, right?  
“I want this to be perfect.” 

*****************************************

The package arrived first thing in the morning, dropped off by a pair of owls working in tandem. Molly was fixing breakfast when she heard the sound of it landing on the stoop and went out to see what it was.

“Arthur, look at this,” she called as she brought it inside. It was fairly heavy, though not overly large. A card was wedged under the twine used to bind the paper around the box. "It’s from… oh! It’s from George, dear.”

Arthur came into the kitchen, still in his robe, as Molly undid the twine with a tap of her wand. “Some new product again?” he asked sleepily, scratching at his mussed hair. “If it’s more of those wandering sneakbombs from last time, we’ll have to have a talk with him. When the two that got away went off, the smell lasted for-“

“Arthur.” This time there was a subtle edge of command to Molly’s voice. “Don’t you know what today is?”

“Wha… erm… a… birthday?” Arthur ventured, turning very red and glancing at the clock as though he’d find the answer there.

The exasperated sigh she let out could have shaken foundations. “It’s VALENTINE’S Day,” she said. “Look, this’ll be the card.”

The card turned out to be a simple Muggle affair, with a teddy bear on the front and the words “I love you beary much” printed on the inside. Molly read it and smiled, then turned it over to Arthur, who glanced at the back and let out an excited little laugh at the muggle greeting. Only then he opened it and read what George had written under the card’s stock greeting. “Happy Valentine’s Day. It’s a day to be with the ones you love, right? This new item I created, I hope you like. I’ll explain more next time we visit, but for now, you start it by tapping the green square on top with your wand. After all, being with the ones important to you is what this day’s about right? Wishing you a quiet holiday – George and Angelina. Huh. How nice of them.”

Molly had the paper off and was now pulling the lid off the box. “Leave it to our sons to talk around things instead of… oh. My, how pretty. Look, Arthur.”

It was indeed pretty, an ornate silver picture frame etched to look like the twining branches of a tree full of leaves. As she pulled it out, she found the frame, instead of standing alone, was mounted onto a narrow box that covered most of the back. The place for the picture was an expanse of gray emptiness. She set it up on the table and the pair of them just looked at it for the moment.

“Lot of buildup for a frame,” Arthur said thoughtfully, glancing from the card to the gift and back. “Ahh. I suppose it does something when you tap the button like he said in the card. Muggles have these frames where they use mechanics to record sounds, so maybe it’s something like that.”

Molly tilted the frame, found the green square and gave it a smart tap. “I suppose. I wonder why he had to make it so heavy if that’s all he-“

She stopped abruptly as a voice, so familiar and yet different somehow, indeed issued forth from the frame. “George? Hey, George-“

As she set the frame back in its original place, the center faded from gray to black, then the darkness split horizontally and the two halves pulled back to reveal-

“Fred,” Molly whispered. “Oh…”

“Hey George, come on,” the Fred in the frame was saying. “It’s Christmas and no one’s up yet! If we sneak down now, I’ll bet we can slip some _extra_ presents into the stockings.”

It was that familiar impish grin, much younger than last Arthur remembered, but familiar no less. “They were eight,” he said, more to himself than to Molly. “Stink pellets in their brothers’ stockings, wasn’t it?”

Molly didn’t reply, but now the scene was changing. It faded to black, then brightened again and now they could see their family jostling to get onto a magic carpet which said it could fit all of them but which obviously could not. The warm colors of Egypt and the ages of the children again dated the scene, this time to their family trip. Everyone was talking over one another, and Fred and Charlie were trying to help their father stretch the carpet as far as it would go, while Percy complained that they should just exchange it and Bill was explaining something about the culture to Ron and Ginny. 

“Come on Percy, move your foot,” Fred was saying as he yanked on one corner. “You can’t show us how much you know about the place if we never get there, right?”

“You could have bothered to learn a few things about the area too,” Percy said, though he moved his foot first. “It’s really fascinating, and- whup!”

Scabbers the rat made a leap for freedom, eluding Percy’s clumpy attempts to stop him. Looking up at the interruption of Percy’s tirade, Fred snagged the rodent out of the air and handed it back. “Hey, be careful. Don’t wanna lose him HERE, we’ll never find him again.”

“Er… thanks,” Percy said, accepting the animal back. 

Beside Arthur in the kitchen, he heard Molly let out a strained little laugh. He put an arm around her and said, “Molly? Maybe we should-“

But she didn’t answer and the screen faded out again, then it was one of the bedrooms at Hogwarts. The scene was focused on a fireplace, then shifted dizzily to focus on Fred, who was sitting at the foot of the bed. “So we’re really going to do it?” Asked a voice, so like Fred’s but somehow more resonant. 

“What unusual pictures,” Arthur said.

“Memories.”

“What?”

“They’re memories. George’s memories,” Molly said.

In the frame, Fred was nodding. “You think it’ll be okay?”

“You’re worried about Mum?” George asked.

Fred let out a little half-laugh. “Well, she’s always known we weren’t Bill or Charlie. OR Percy.” That last elicited a laugh from George. “Hardly. But I just don’t want her to… you know…”

For the briefest of moments, in this private scene between the twins, the confidence in Fred’s face fell just a little. “I just don’t want her to be sad, once we leave school. She sees graduating as such a big deal, and you know? I just don’t want things to be like with Him.”

The scene rocked again, apparently from George leaning forward, for the picture of Fred was abruptly larger. “It’s nothing like that,” George said. “We won’t let it, right? And you know mum, she’ll scold us, and maybe tell us how hopeless we are, but then she’ll come by the shop to make sure we’re eating properly and keeping the place clean.”

“Right," Fred said. “Ah well. Promise we’ll wear those sweaters she makes every Christmas no matter what then?”

George laughed again. “Of course. If the shop does well, maybe we’ll even get her one this year.”

As this one faded out, Arthur tilted his head to look at his wife’s face. Tear wet her cheeks, but she was smiling, a smile wider than he’d seen for… well, for a long time. 

“They did, remember?” she asked Arthur without looking at him. The next scene had started, a memory of a quidditch match. “The sweater. Told me I had to wear it because they’d spent ages deciding on it. I thought they were joking.”

“Maybe we should pause it. Just for a while,” Arthur said, feeling completely conflicted. Seeing Fred again hurt. But seeing him happy – seeing that his brother remembered him happy – left him happy as well.

Molly took and expelled a deep breath, then tapped it off again. “You’re right. Best to save some for later. I’ve got to finish breakfast, and don’t forget Ginny and Harry will be over for lunch. I can’t wait for them to see.” She bustled around the kitchen with renewed enthusiasm. The tears were drying from her face, but the smile remained, and every once in a while some thought caused a slight chuckle, a shake of the head. Memories of the boys in their childhood? Of jokes? Good memories, obviously. 

And Arthur hid his eyes, but not his smile.


End file.
